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5.0 out of 5 stars
Archie goes undercover, April 28 2002
Unlike Archie's last such assignment (in _Too Many Women_, written 10 years before this book), this case gives the reader a decent chance to solve the puzzle.Ordinarily, Wolfe wouldn't ask where Archie's been when he comes in at 2 a.m. But when Archie walked out on Lily Rowan's party because she'd invited some people he didn't like, she started calling the brownstone, starting at 8 p.m. and ending at 1:30 ("So I, not you, have spent the evening with her, and I haven't enjoyed it.") The conversation went downhill from there, so when Otis Jarrell appeared for his first appointment with Wolfe the next day, he got the benefit of a rather stormy atmosphere, with Wolfe exerting himself to be pleasant, just to show that nothing's wrong with *him*. (To be fair, the brown envelope with $10000, cash, offered as a retainer, might have helped.) Unfortunately for the exchequer, what Jarrell wants is to break up his son's marriage: Wyman married "a snake", and Jarrell believes that Susan has leaked damaging business information to his competitors several times. He wants to pass Archie off as a replacement for his own newly fired secretary, Jim Eber, until Wolfe and Archie come up with the goods. Archie's beginning to feel sorry for the rejection Jarrell has coming at this point - not only a near-divorce case, but depriving Wolfe of his services indefinitely - when Wolfe responds, "You realize, Mr. Jarrell, that there could be no commitment as to how long he would stay there." Archie, always a quick thinker, runs with this rather than squawking, and "Alan Green" becomes Jarrell's secretary. Archie's new assignment palls very quickly. But matters become deadly serious when someone bypasses the security cameras in Jarrell's office to steal Jarrell's own gun, and Jarrell is too fixated on Susan as a suspect to get serious about finding it. Then matters escalate to plain deadly... Leavening the mix of emotional relationships and industrial espionage are several timetables distilled from police reports, but they're provided in one big block so that you can ignore them at your own peril if you prefer. (Personally, I can enjoy this one just fine without worrying much about trying to work out the puzzle.) More interesting points include: Jarrell's daughter Lois, who (despite writing the poem from which the book's title is taken) is one of the 3 best dancers Archie's ever escorted; the measures taken by Archie to appear as Alan Green when the group is interviewed by Wolfe; and how Wolfe manages to escalate their quarrel to a new and more frightening level. :)
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